Winter Photo Editing Approach

Now that it’s 2018, and winter just started recently, one of the things that I’ve been meaning to do is show how I approach photo editing. One of the ways that I approach editing is not so much when I take the photo, but when I actually begin the editing process. The reason for that, is that editing as a process is primarily mood-based for me. More often than not, I’ll find myself sitting on photos that I feel unsure about until something changes. Either it’s my mood, how I’m looking at the photo, or something else entirely. Around this time of year, it’s the season and the weather that change my outlook on how a photo should be edited.

Take for example my most recent photo taken at the The Oculus:

Oculus Isolation by Miguel Montana

One of the main things that makes The Oculus so appealing is it’s white interior and it’s spacious architectural design. It’s a truly captivating thing to be inside of, but it’s not something that’s appreciated in a different color other than white. Which is something that I wanted to capture in this cold winter season, a different take on an otherwise immaculate piece of architecture. However, it’s hard to capture how much of a difference temperature, seasons, and time take on a photograph so to illustrate that better, I’ll be using another photo that I took last year to truly capture the essence of editing based on seasonal moods.

As you can tell from these two photos, they both suggest entirely different things. One offers a more “autumn” feel to it, while the other conveys the harshness of winter. But since it’s extremely cold now, I think going with the colder feeling is the better choice. This also better illustrates my editing choices, as there’s a certain degree of “pop” added to the edited photo, too. This is meant to captivate the attention and give the photo a more dimensional feel to it that otherwise isn’t reflective in the unedited version.

Ultimately, editing is always a stylistic choice and while I might find my edited photo to be great, someone else will look at the unedited one and think it was fine as is. And that’s fine too, as art is purely subjective and beholden to whoever is looking at it for appreciation. The goal for me is to convey the type of mood that I want through my photos, and in this case, it’s the ridiculously cold winter that’s happening in New York during this time of year. Brr.